Consider a blood meter application for example. Some designers may prefer to use the 16-bit ADC for high accuracy with reduced throughput, while others may choose to use the 12-bit ADC for higher throughput at a lower resolution. Much of this depends on the chemistries being measured. In some cases designers may use both ADCs, sampling quickly at a lower resolution until the area of interest is reached, and then swapping to a lower sample rate at a higher resolution.

The reason the folks at Microchip refer to all of this as "intelligent analog" is that all of the analog design was performed by Microchip -- they debugged the noise and communication so that designers obtain consistent analog performance across applications.

The benefits of integrating the analog on the MCU include faster data paths, reduced noise, and the ability to change the analog parameters in software, all of which help to simplify board designs and reduce cost and board space. For example, consider the following board design without and with PIC24 GC intelligent analog:

The integrated analog -- fast 12-bit ADC and high-resolution 16-bit ADC coupled with a complete signal chain comprising op-amps and the 10-bit DAC -- reduces costs and simplifies the design. The rich information display (which offers both Western and Asian characters) can be used to provide textual and graphical guidance to the user, including adjustable text size for seniors. The USB interface can be used to send data to a physician or upload it to the Internet. And the use of eXtreme Low Power technology means the device can run for as long as 10 years on a coin cell (longer with an AAA lithium battery).

In order to get designers "up and running," Microchip also offers a PIC24F Starter Kit for Intelligent Analog (cost = $89.99; part number = DM240015; availability = now) as illustrated below:

I'm expecting to see more analog functions with tightly coupled digital controls that can be an 'offload' engine from the CPU. Once the CPU can just go to sleep until an analog signal hits a specific level (or even better a series of 'transitions') to trigger a wake command we are really in the intelligent analog/digital world.